If you call Oregon home, though, where do you go? The Parson Red Heads drove south and didn’t stop ‘til Los Angeles. There they shared a cramped one-bedroom, rehearsed non-stop and ultimately embedded themselves into the Silver Lake bar-pop community.

Having grown up in Medford and gone to school in Eugene, it would have been easy for singer and guitarist Evan Way to bring the band to Portland. Too easy, he says: “If you’re in LA, you’re here to focus and make music. Otherwise there’s no point to being here. It’s a really difficult place to live.”

Lucky for them, Evan and the rest of the band—wife Brette Marie Way on drums, sister Erin Way on keyboards (says Evan: “If I wasn’t in a band with my family, I’d probably never see them!”) with Samuel Fowles on guitar and bass by David Swensen—adapted to life as struggling musical transplants.

Since their 2005 move they’ve played countless local shows, performed residencies at both Spaceland and the Echo, and released four EPs and the pleasant King Giraffe CD. Giraffe includes the memorable “Punctual as Usual,” which starts off as dead-on Replacements (but with an accent-less Gram Parsons singing) before ascending into a staccato chorus recalling Squeeze in their Argybargy days: loud, simple major key stuff played proud and fast.

Their most recent release, The Owl and the Timber, is more ambitious. First track “County Line” is slow guitar and tom buildup that slips into a fast pop song. It’s kind of like America if they grew up around ‘70s pub rock guys: harmonies and pretty arpeggiated chords with the drums turned way up and guitars way overdriven.

Evan says the Parson Red Heads of today have changed for the better: They’re more collaborative (“We share more song writing now, which is really cool!”), more diverse in sound (instrumental “Owl Me Timbers” is like Belle and Sebastian with noisy piano and heavy guitars), and there are more people on stage. They’ve brought as many as 15 people aboard before, he says: “It’s a little hectic up there. I’m sure it probably comes across to the audience as hectic, too. But being a part of it, it’s a little crazy, but really fun.”

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